Anatomy of a garden

Portland Castle

The new garden at Portland Castle, in Dorset, has been designed by the minimalist Christopher Bradley-Hole, a celebrated exponent of the modern style. The result is a thoroughly coherent, intelligent landscape brimming with narrative content and symbolism.

An incomplete ring of Portland stone walling expresses the generations of earlier interventions made at this site and echoes the circular outline of the castle itself. Bradley-Hole likens the garden to a sort of palimpsest, a reused manuscript on which successive texts have been written. "Our markings overlay those made by other people but are never quite free of them," he says. In this way, the new garden becomes merely the latest in a sequence of events, part of a linear history, rather than serving to obliterate or overpower whatever came before.

The garden connects with the surrounding landscape visually, through its materials as well as its design. Even the positioning of blocks of planting at compass points within the circle is a cryptic maritime allusion, so appropriate in this historical waterside setting. This garden was clearly not thrown together in a hurry (01305 820539, english-heritage.org.uk).

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